On 2007-09-29, Roberto Zunino <zunino at di.unipi.it> wrote:
> Graham Hutton wrote:
>> Readers of this list may enjoy the following note by
>> Martin Escardo, which shows how to write a number of
>> "seemingly impossible Haskell programs" that perform
>> exhaustive searches over spaces of infinite size, by
>> exploiting some ideas from topology:
>>>>http://math.andrej.com/2007/09/28/seemingly-impossible-functional-programs/#more-69>> Very nice! The note shows that you can actually compute (forall p) where
> p is a *total* predicate over streams of Bool (a.k.a. infinite lazy
> lists). Indeed, (writing [] for streams)
>> forall :: ([Bool] -> Bool) -> Bool
>> seems impossible to compute.
>> Here's what I understood: (which might be wrong, of course!)
>> This apparent magic relies on the fact that any total predicate over
> (total) bool streams, i.e.
>> p :: [Bool] -> Bool
>> can only inspect a _finite_ prefix of the input list.
Well, any /computable/ total predicate. This distinction isn't
that relevant when we're talking about predicates we might want to
implement and run, but there is a mathematical distinction.
--
Aaron Denney
-><-